humanity

If nothing else, travel opens your eyes to the colorful quilt that is humankind.

Frankie's Plan
Frankie’s Plan Frankie was tired. Bone tired. She had pulled another double at the café yesterday, and her feet were still killing her. Today's shift promised to be busy. Frankie would have loved nothing more than to have two days in a row off of work. Like a normal weekend that normal people get every week! Wouldn’t that be awesome? She would never know. She couldn’t afford to have two days off every week! Certainly not weekend days. Those were the big tip days; there’s no way Frankie could miss weekend shifts and stick to the Plan.
By Sheila Dugan Jensen5 years ago in Wander
B 612
Once when I was six my grandfather told me a story about an adventurous Pilot whom, while stranded alone in the Sahara Desert, meets an extraordinary little fellow.
By J.M. MacDuff5 years ago in Wander
Possibilities
She found the pocket-sized book in her grandparent’s library. The term “library” loosely applied – the room had previously been a garage, converted to a bedroom where her parents slept when they visited. Three of the walls were covered in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, stacked with books of an incongruous variety. Old, leather-bound religious texts sat next to Agatha Christie novels, and romance novels with covers containing beautiful women and men whose hair blew in the breeze. A perfect mix of her strict grandfather and fun-loving grandmother.
By Sarah Lustgarten 5 years ago in Wander
Lucky Day
Fraught with a case of the vapors after wandering drunk I stumbled upon a local cinema. Surely the cooling systems will provide adequate relief from this sweltering heat I thought. I notice the ticket booth is stationed outside and quite a distance from the actual entrance. No fear, I'm not that sweaty and this theater should be empty enough to not force a poor soul upon my saddening aroma. As I approach the ticket island, hoards of fellow moviegoers race in front of me to form a queue. Blast, the afternoon sun burns with the might of a thousand magnifying glasses stacked one atop another blazing down upon my face.
By Luis Jimenez5 years ago in Wander
Julio & Julia
“What’s that?” Erica peaked at the package in my hand. We lived together in a small apartment in Los Angeles's west side. I furrowed my eyebrow and shook my head, “I’m not sure. I don’t remember buying anything.”
By Micky Ferguson5 years ago in Wander
George
"I'm George from L.A.," he said it so smoothly with such ease I had to look twice. No, it wasn't George Michael not with an American accent, though his 5 o'clock shadow hinted his look came borrowed from the beloved 80's icon and his style in the era of his album Faith. I wished it was him. The small casual perfect Greek hotel was washed white inside and out and George was wearing white loose linen pants and a shirt, he blended in. A smooth disposition to go along with the soft calm of the Aegean summer air and perfect sun. The light outside was sharp, the sun hot in June and the shadows it cast into the stone hotel lobby at once enchanted and invited us to enter. "Are you guys staying here?" he asked and we answered "yes". He wanted to check in and we all checked in at the same time. Back then you needed to give the lobby desk your passport as collateral so we handed them over and got the room key. The hotel proprietor assumed we were a group. My 2 friends and I had our own room and George got his own room. We agreed to meet later for dinner that evening which in the Greek summer starts around 8ish and goes late into the night. We couldn't wait.
By AJ5 years ago in Wander
The Break
He put his shoulder to the wind and walked through the lifeless streets. His mind raced, he wished to free himself from his suburban cell, to live quietly among hills and trees, to hear birds and rivers, to never again hear a siren or crash. He needed space to work, to create and think. His sensitivity often left him wounded by the modern world that valued production over feeling and appearance over sight. His day to day had become torturous to him, he longed for the world of Hesse, Goethe and all those who have lived life as art and thusly created art as life. He wanted to wander, to have no home, to be swept away in the rushing current of existence and the natural world. He wished to lay his head upon a mossy knell because he was tired, not because he had a job to rise for, he wanted to eat what he could forage and not what he could afford. He wished for the stars and the infallible pulse of the universe to be his guides, not the common mind of man that bid him work, endure, settle.
By Henry Gatrell5 years ago in Wander
DON'T TALK TO STRANGERS
I feel excited, nervous, naïve, and filled with unbridled ambition. I am in my senior year of high school, and I won one of the most prestigious awards for a high school student, the Aimee Poisson Grant for Journalism. The grant is awarded to the crème de la crème for high school students. I, with fifty students, will study with some of the world's best journalists for three months. We will stay in dorms at the Université de Paris. The committee will give us a translator, and they have arranged personal tours in Paris for us.
By VALERIE THOMPSON 5 years ago in Wander
Jake’s Little Black Book
Jake McKerrigan hadn’t put much stock in anything his father had to say for decades. As a child, Jake had called out the senior McKerrigan for idiocy in thinking when the old man said Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma was going to be “bigger than Harvard.”
By Maria K. Fotopoulos5 years ago in Wander
Memoirs of a Mountaineer
Albert takes up a new hobby Albert Barnaby Weber was 74 years old when he discovered geocaching. It was his Wife, Penny’s, idea. She had heard about it from her nurse and was filled with excitement reporting the details back to her husband as he wheeled her out of the hospital.
By Megan Tinsdale5 years ago in Wander
1969
As secretary of Tulsa Heritage Bank, my day consists of prepping the coffee, answering calls, and readily greeting customers with a smile. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was all my life would amount to. But, on one day in 1969, the sun was just beginning to droop towards the west and I was heading home. I recall feeling particularly stifled by the heat and suffocated by my pantyhose. I rummaged through my bag to find my keys, only to look up and see a black notebook propped against my windshield. Suspicious, I looked around to see if anyone else was nearby. I picked up the foreign object and opened it in the name of curiosity.
By Dailey Whitehouse5 years ago in Wander
A Nomad’s Notebook
Chains of marigold flowers dance in the window as the bus trundles over bumps and potholes. Glass beads and a golden Ganesha swing to and fro above the driver. Even the roof is decorated in a riot of coloured paints, all clamouring to brighten the passengers’ spirits, despite most of them being fast asleep. Tabla drums and the wistful tune of a bansuri flute play through speakers above the dreaming heads, their rhythm bouncing even more than the bus’s wheels on the uneven road.
By Sarah Hatch5 years ago in Wander